Letters from the Front Exhibition

At 11am on the 11th April, the Rt Hon Damian Green opened the ‘Letters from the Front’ exhibition in the stables at Godinton House. This exhibition will run for the 2014 season and is available for all of our House and Garden visitors.

In January 1915, six months after war had been declared, Mrs Elizabeth Quinton Strouts of the village of Great Chart, decided to help our men in the armed forces. She formed a small committee with some other ladies, called ‘The Great Chart Sailors and Soldiers War Fund’, the object of which was to send useful and comforting articles every week to the men of the parish fighting for their King and Country. Not only to lighten their hardship but to remind them that they were not forgotten.

It is the very quantity of letters, more than 20,000 pages in all, from such a small community which makes this collection unique. Only a minute fraction of the whole collection is displayed, so it primarily concentrates on the letters from those who were lost, including men who worked at Godinton.